How bad does a bill have to be to make it too bad to vote for?
Now, the moment of truth isn’t here quite yet: There’s enough wrong with the Baucus proposal as it stands to make it unworkable and unacceptable. But that said, Senator Baucus’s mark is better than many of us expected. If it serves as a basis for negotiation, and the result of those negotiations is a plan that’s stronger, not weaker, reformers are going to have to make some hard choices about the degree of disappointment they’re willing to live with.
Of course, those who insist that we must have a single-payer system — Medicare for all — won’t accept any plan that tries, instead, to cajole and coerce private health insurers into covering everyone. But while many reformers, myself included, would prefer a single-payer system if we were starting from scratch, international experience shows that it’s not the only way to go. Several European countries, including Switzerland and the Netherlands, have managed to achieve universal coverage with a mainly private insurance system.

A Peoria couple is suing Walmart and the state after they were accused of sexual abuse for taking bathtime photos of their daughters, according to court papers.
Lisa and Anthony "A.J." Demaree's three young daughters were taken away by state Child Protective Services last fall when a Walmart employee found partially nude pictures of the girls on a camera memory stick taken to the store for processing, the lawsuit claims.
Walmart turned the photos over to police and the Demarees were not allowed to see their children for several days and did not regain custody for a month while the state investigated, according to their lawyer, Richard Treon.
Treon said the images in question were part of a group of 144 photographs taken mostly the family's vacation in San Diego. He said there were seven to eight bath- and playtime photos of the girls that showed a "portion or outline or genitalia."
At the time of the incident, the girls were 5, 4 and 1 1/2.
It was about "wanting to admire their (children's) beauty," Treon said. "There was nothing sexual about it."

In 2004, two Israeli researchers, Avi Assor and Guy Roth, joined Edward L. Deci, a leading American expert on the psychology of motivation, in asking more than 100 college students whether the love they had received from their parents had seemed to depend on whether they had succeeded in school, practiced hard for sports, been considerate toward others or suppressed emotions like anger and fear.
It turned out that children who received conditional approval were indeed somewhat more likely to act as the parent wanted. But compliance came at a steep price. First, these children tended to resent and dislike their parents. Second, they were apt to say that the way they acted was often due more to a “strong internal pressure” than to “a real sense of choice.” Moreover, their happiness after succeeding at something was usually short-lived, and they often felt guilty or ashamed.
In a companion study, Dr. Assor and his colleagues interviewed mothers of grown children. With this generation, too, conditional parenting proved damaging. Those mothers who, as children, sensed that they were loved only when they lived up to their parents’ expectations now felt less worthy as adults. Yet despite the negative effects, these mothers were more likely to use conditional affection with their own children.

September 17, 2009

Mothers with children at home are more likely to use social media than any other average person, according to a national study released Wednesday.
The Retail Advertising and Marketing Association study showed that more than 60 percent of stay-at-home moms are more likely to use Facebook, more than 42 percent are more likely to use MySpace and nearly 17 percent are more likely to use Twitter. That's compared to average adults – 50 percent of which use Facebook, 34 percent that use MySpace and 15 percent that use Twitter.

Facebook suddenly takes in $1 billion in advertising for soap flakes and air freshener.